Youths across Sussex discuss plans to stop bullying

“It was horrific,” says the now 22-year-old, from Brighton.

“Day in and day out, it was emotional, it was physical. It takes a lot to grow up and realise stepping out of your front door in the morning you are not going to get beaten up.”

Despite a broken jaw and often coming home “black and blue”, police never got involved, she added, with the school preferring to keep things “in house”. Things have become better for Jessica since leaving the playground bullies behind, but that and other turbulence left her wanting to help others going through similar problems.

She and 28 fellow under-25s have spent the past few months talking to some 2,000 peers across the county about their lives and experiences with the authorities. They have presented their findings to the police and other officials in the hope of making things better.

And what they found out by talking to each other may well cause a stir.

Some problems they found have been that way for years: youngsters have trouble grasping the long-term consequences of misdemeanours. Police are often seen as distant or threatening.

Young people who have been abused had no idea what to do about it.

Yet other problems have got much more complicated: bullies have gained power and anonymity online. Drug-dealing behind the bike shed has morphed into brightly-packaged chemicals, confusingly described as ‘legal’ and available in a corner shop or straight from the internet.

The world some inhabit certainly shocked Katy Bourne, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) who set up the band of inquisitive 14 to 25-year-olds, otherwise known as the Sussex Youth Commission.

She dropped in on some of their sessions.

“One of the groups we did was on drugs,” she said.

“The young people were asked to create a list of drugs and I think one came up with 60 different drugs and he listed them in their order of potency and strength.

“He was so knowledgeable because it was all around him and this was the life that he had been subjected to.”

Mrs Bourne set up the commission about nine months ago with the idea that it could help her develop the strategy she sets for police.

She had been approached by the SHM Foundation, a charitable foundation working for “positive social change”.

The foundation was set up in 2008 by former and current Cambridge academics and was developing similar projects with PCCs in two other counties.

SHM and Mrs Bourne’s office have match-funded the project, each contributing £15,000.

Rose Dowling, director of SHM’s political academy, which aims to “nurture a new generation of political leaders and contributors”, has been working on it closely.

Miss Bourne said her own office was deluged with applications to join the commission, with one of her assistants having to carry out phone interviews, plucking out those they felt would best represent the county’s youth.

“I was not looking for the young, middle-class youth as much as I wanted some of these young people who had different experiences of growing up,” said Mrs Bourne.

“So I wanted young people who have been looked-after, who had been offenders, who have had issues of varying sorts.”

Nadine Smith, 18, from Crawley, was chosen and said she wanted to get across a better picture of police. “My own perceptions of the police were always negative,” she said. “I was a young offender. I don’t know why, maybe the people I hung around with and my area. I was in fights or shoplifting.

“But I just wanted to change my own perceptions and other people’s perceptions of the police so it was more positive.”

Fellow commission member Lakeisha Lakoya 20, from Falmer, emerged from the riots that engulfed her former home town of Croydon in 2011 with a clear view of what was at stake.

Stressing that young people were not the only ones to blame for the mayhem, the Sussex University student said: “It really showed me that young people do have feelings and, in most circumstances, if they don’t have the chance to share them they will share them in the wrong way.

“It really made me realise that there need to be representatives to voice their opinions.”

Different motivations aside, the commission members spent the past eight months talking to others of their age group via schools, youth clubs, domestic abuse charities and online, sometimes just speaking to people on Brighton beach.

What surfaced was not only the problems but a list of recommendations for police, schools and other authorities to make things better, ranging from youngsters carrying out work experience with the police, to preventing young offenders influencing each other in rehabilitation programmes.

“The Youth Offending Team can make things worse by putting young offenders together, reinforcing negative patterns of behaviour,” the commission report observed, adding that prison was not always an effective deterrent, with some youths finding it “too comfortable”.

Among other suggestions was having a group of youth advisors to work with Sussex Police long-term and teachers getting a better grip on cyber-bullying. “Bullying has changed throughout the years,” the commission said. “Young people feel that the police perhaps don’t understand because they are older and of a different age range. Also, they might assume that bullying has not changed.”

Miss Lakoya and her partner on the commission made awful discoveries while investigating domestic abuse and sexual assaults. Young people told them their experiences of abuse were not taken seriously, while many seemed unclear exactly how to recognise it.

“One girl had been sexually assaulted and a friend’s mum took them to the police station and the experience she had at the police station was not good,” Miss Lakoya said. “She was sent all over the place. She left with a negative impression of the police.”

The pair called for psychologists to be available straight away to all young people reporting abuse, and lessons in school about how to respond to it.

Some of the group’s recommendations are, to some extent, already in force. Sussex Police has liaison officers visiting nearly all schools, for example, and punishing young offenders without taking them to court is widespread.

Yet many young people were obviously unaware of some of this work or felt it did not go far enough.

The youngsters claimed their first triumph on Tuesday with Giles York, chief constable of Sussex Police, when he pledged to implement “as many of the recommendations as possible” and “put the resources behind this to make this really come to life”.

The police chief also spoke about the challenges police face when dealing with youngsters.

“I think some of the biggest challenges that we have is what I call proportionality,” he said. “Somebody calling somebody a name on Twitter – do you really need the police involved in this, do you really need the school involved in this?

“I think where our policing needs to get better is in understanding what are the triggers that this is getting serious, that it’s getting above what may be termed as ‘banter’.”

Mr York said he told his own children they have to have met someone in person for them to become a friend on Facebook.

He said: “Parents saying, ‘I don’t understand this, just get on with what you are doing,’ is a bit like saying, ‘Stay out all night, I don’t care what you do.’”

“I know when I was growing up there was a parameter of where I was allowed to go,” he added.

He said he thought distractions – such as playing football – were often a better deterrent from crime than threats of punishment and local authority youth clubs needed to create opportunities.

Mr York gained laughs at the event by posing for selfies but the youth commission spoke of a “long lack of faith in the police and their ability to help young people” and said “many interactions are seen by the young as negative”.

Asked why he thought that was, Mr York said: “I think because they behave like young people and police behave like grown-ups.”

He added: “I think the police sometimes struggle to engage with different communities, whether black, elderly or young, because we don’t live the lives they lead and cannot always understand the lives that they are going through.”

Both sides appeared to think the recommendations from the youth commission were a good place to start bridging that gap.

Mr York added: “I think the biggest thing for me in this is the volume of the message. I did not simply have a conversation with a young person or sat in a classroom, this involves 2,000 conversations across Sussex, so it has some credibility, some weight to it.”

Findings and recommendations of the Youth Commission in brief

FINDINGS:

• Some young people do not understand the consequences of a criminal record.
• The Youth Offending Team putting offenders together makes things worse; they influence each other.
• Prison is not an effective deterrent.
• Some young people with a criminal record feel they are labelled for life and the odds are against them.
• Peer pressure and personal problems are the biggest root causes of drug and alcohol problems.
• Alcohol, drugs and legal highs are easily available.
• Young people do not have a realistic idea of the consequences of drugs.
• They cannot easily go for help due to stigma/illegality of taking drugs.
• Experiences of abuse not taken seriously when reported.
• Bullying is often online and anonymous nowadays.
• Young people often feel threatened by police on the streets.
• Need for more “empathetic and respectful” interactions between young people and police.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Early intervention with possible offenders.
• Mentoring with ex-offenders.
• Prevent offenders meeting each other via Youth Offending Team.
• Tougher community sentences rather than prison.
• Training for police on root causes of offending among young people.
• Lessons about steering clear of drugs from former addicts.
• Increase police knowledge of use of internet on legal highs.
• Psychologists offered to young people reporting abuse.
• Relationship and abuse education in school.
• Teachers need to know more about cyber-bullying.
• Work experience in the police force for young people.
• Independent youth advisory group to work with senior Sussex Police staff.